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Every one of the outstanding playwrights push the limits of theatre. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly specialized themes – ranging from chaotic systems to moral philosophy and the mystery of awareness – and transform them into humorous, inventive and frequently emotional dramas. Drama, the actor Olivier noted, is a significant glamoriser of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his capacity to animate intellectual concepts.

Early Encounter

I was lucky enough to encounter Stoppard early on. That was completely due to Philip French, who, besides being a cinema critic, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation programme maker. In 1966 he asked me to present a short talk on two broadcast plays by a then little-known writer called Tom Stoppard. In The Dissolution of Dominic Boot, an broke writer ran up an constantly rising cab fare. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It says much for Stoppard’s graciousness that even after I had appeared on TV in 1968 and given a sniffy premiere review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he was perfectly courteous. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an one-time reporter himself, he knew the workings of the media.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was driven by thoughts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we belatedly came to recognise that Pinter was consistently a political playwright, so we finally came to see that there was an depth of emotion to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two minor characters from Hamlet, but multiple watchings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of chance circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had played Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an iconic Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the word is all. The word is beating back the quiet, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even tragic.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and feeling was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, after all, was a play that asked a significant moral issue: whether social morality was a conditioned response to history or whether principles followed an unchanging, divinely inspired law. Not your average dramatic theme, but here the subject of a speech being developed by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one understood that it was also about the pain of a failing marriage and the dangers of a collapsing society in which space travelers were scrapping on the moon and a former agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Thorough Preparation and Affecting Revelation

Stoppard’s achievement – one he had in common with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were amenable to plays about complicated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, running into him on the steps of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he answered.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The breakthrough perhaps came with Real Thing (1982) which ages better than most of his plays to restaging. It raises a multitude of issues such as whether any social obligation is the result of individual madness and whether ideas such as justice and national pride exist beyond our understanding of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so accessible – is a intense consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which explores determinism and volition, classicism and Romanticism, and a multitude of other things, functions because it is deeply moving. Ideas and sentiment flawlessly merge in a scene where a brilliant young girl, Thomasina, mourns the loss of past civilizations to which her instructor answers: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and forgotten will have their time again.” And that is exactly what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking revision of the classical physics outlasts her tragically abbreviated life.

Questioning the Power of Theatre

Stoppard’s talent as a dramatist was rarely questioned. What was debated, particularly in the early years, were his skepticism about the effectiveness of drama: something he frequently discussed in conversations. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a jerk if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or social housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it says nothing about anything.”

I think he was totally wrong about that since Wilde’s play presents a running commentary on finance, matrimony, ethics, status, the fall of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard weakened his own position by writing a number of works that engage to great effect with the misuse of individual freedoms by oppressive regimes. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It showed a Russian dissident wrongly diagnosed crazy and locked in a cell with an genuine madman who imagines himself in control of an symphony. It was shocking both to see the full London Symphony Orchestra on the stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with black comedy. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and inflexibility with a